DriveScale today announced a new architecture that moves datacentre infrastructure from standard rack server deployments into flexible, composable infrastructure capable of handling Hadoop deployments of any size and other modern application workloads. DriveScale enables a scale-out architecture previously only found in webscale organisations, allowing for more flexible scaling of datacentre assets. DriveScale customers include AppNexus, ClearSense, DST Systems and Foxconn’s Ingrasys.

Using the DriveScale platform, datacentre administrators can deploy independent pools of commodity compute and storage resources, automatically discover available assets, and combine and recombine these resources as needed. The solution is provided via a set of on-premises and SaaS tools that coordinate between multiple levels of infrastructure. DriveScale’s platform targets organisations looking to future-proof their infrastructure, maximise datacentre efficiency and deliver higher services to internal customers.
 
“The DriveScale founders invented the technology that few, if any, thought to build,” said Scott McNealy, Cofounder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems and advisor to DriveScale. “That’s because it takes decades of experience in production-grade server, storage and networking technology development to create something that actually simplifies provisioning and creates new efficiencies, rather than make it all more complicated.”
 
“Scale-out infrastructure has the potential to completely remake the data center, but existing challenges to adoption remain. Current scale-out still employs traditional rack servers, which are not designed to handle modern big data applications,” said Tom Lyon, Chief Scientist and Cofounder at DriveScale. “DriveScale helps enterprises more quickly adopt an effective scale-out infrastructure by providing flexibility and basic tools that let data center administrators modify their infrastructure more quickly in response to changing application requirements and, as a result, say yes to more big data workloads.”
 
The rigid structure of compute and drives in the same chassis results in a loss of infrastructure flexibility, forcing scale-out operators to make difficult trade-offs, including saying no to business requests or over-provisioning and underutilising resources. Modern applications, changing business needs and rapid scale-out ecosystem evolution creates an increasing need for independent resources to scale. With DriveScale’s disaggregation and recomposition technology, datacentre admins can manage compute and storage resources as separate pools and flexibly bind together these elements in any ratio required by an application.
 
“It is important to me that when we deliver our healthcare analytics solutions to our customers, we’ve done everything possible to ensure a productive, scalable and economically viable environment. We spent a lot of time engineering our software environment around real-time needs. Now, with DriveScale, we have the ability to do the same thing with hardware,” said Charles Boicey, Chief Innovation Officer at ClearSense. “DriveScale helps us build a ‘future-proof’ infrastructure. The ability to maximize our existing hardware resources means that we aren’t forced into making long-term predictions about what we may need in the future and instead can concentrate on responding only to what we need in the very short term. This means that as our customer needs increase, we can respond more quickly and without having to make massive capital expenditures.”